I didn’t fight it.

Dad’s will was Dad’s will. The land was legally Elaine’s now. Every acre. Every bin. Every piece of machinery, including the combine I’d run for nineteen harvests.

I kept farming on a handshake. Elaine kept paying me twenty dollars an hour. I kept living in the little house on the east eighty.

We never talked about the future. I told myself there was time. I told myself she’d do right by me, like Dad said.

Part Four: Harvest Supper

It was a Tuesday in October, at dusk.

We’d been running beans for nine days. The weather had been perfect. Dry, sunny, a little wind. We had four hundred and forty acres in the bin and a hundred and sixty acres left on the west side.

Elaine made harvest supper the way she did every fall. Roast beef and mashed potatoes. Green beans with bacon. Dinner rolls from scratch. Apple crisp with ice cream.

She set the long table in the farmhouse dining room. Seven places.

Our crew was there. Ron Hessler, who’s hauled our grain for eleven years. He’s fifty-nine, with a gray beard and a Pioneer seed cap he never takes off. His wife, Patty, who drives the second grain truck. Deb Kruse, who runs the grain cart, a tough little woman in her forties who can back a semi into a bin faster than any man in the county.

And Tom and Linda Visser, a retired couple from Paullina who help us every harvest because, Tom says, sitting at home makes him want to shoot the television.

The combine sat right outside the dining room window.

A green John Deere S670. Dad bought it used in 2017. I’d run it every harvest since. It was parked in the yard with dust still on the cab, the header unhooked and sitting on its cart, ready for tomorrow morning.

Through the window, I could see the last pink light on the cab glass.

We were halfway through supper. Everybody was tired and happy. Ron was telling a story about a raccoon that got into his grain truck in 1998. Deb was laughing so hard she had to put down her fork.

Elaine passed the gravy.

She said it like she was talking about the weather.

“I signed a new will in Primghar today,” she said.

Ron stopped mid-sentence.

Elaine handed the gravy boat to Linda. She picked up her own fork.

“The land goes to Brad and Kyle,” she said.

Nobody chewed.

Nobody moved.

Out in the yard, a barn cat yowled at something. The kitchen clock ticked.

I sat there with a forkful of roast beef halfway to my mouth.

Brad and Kyle. In Phoenix. Who hadn’t set foot on the place since Dad’s funeral. Who’d worn sunglasses in church and asked what the land was worth per acre over ham sandwiches.

Every acre Dad and I farmed side by side for nineteen years.

To them.

I set my fork down.

I looked at Elaine. She was cutting her roast beef into small, neat pieces. She didn’t look up.

My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears.

Here’s what I knew.

Dad’s will was Dad’s will. The land was legally hers. She had every right in the world to leave it to whoever she wanted. Her sons. The church. The Humane Society.

There was nothing to fight. There was no paper with my name on it. There was no handshake a court would recognize.

There was nothing to fight but her mind.

And nobody changes a mind over roast beef.